The Brown Envelope Sessions

Feedback is important for everyone to grow professionally and personally, but every other organisation struggles with facilitating feedback collection regularly. Late feedback is quite awful when an individual can improve given the feedback, and quite stale when an individual can get a bump out of team appreciation. How do we fix this?

Enter the Brown Envelope Sessions

This is an experiment we are running and quite well too, on our teams.

How do we play?

• Each team schedules a monthly session, an hour is good for around a 10-12 people team.
• In the session, we pick up a person in the room and everyone else has to write feedback for said person, roughly around the following topics-

What am I doing well ? 
What am I not doing well, and how can I improve ?
Do you have any questions for me ?

• While each person is writing their feedback on a card or paper, they have the choice to write their name or leave it anonymous. (Believe me, after a few iterations, nobody wants to be anonymous)
• Once everybody is done writing the feedback, the facilitator collects the feedback, and puts it in an envelope, a brown one if you have some around. The receiver of the feedback cannot open the envelope till the session is over.
• We go round robin and pick the next person

How does this help ?

1. Because its a short meeting, an hour or so, and because people cannot run away, in general feedback is shared and actionable immediately
2. Because its regular, and monthly, its not related to salary, and so people are honest and invested in improvements and appreciations without the shadow of financial implications.
3. These sessions are a great starter to face to face feedback meetings, where you get more detailed feedback

So when are you starting with the Brown Envelope ?  

(Do drop me feedback about this experiment, now off you go.)